Are Social Platforms for Business?
I’m going to lead this post by an email from onoe of my best friends and avid readers of this blog:
Ryan wrote:
I read an interesting article yesterday about how professionals are moving away
from LinkedIn and using Facebook as an alternative…maybe in BusinessWeek, not
sure. Anyway…I woke up this AM to find a request from Sherri to Link Up via
LinkedIn. Out of everyone that I am linked to (only 20 or so people) you have
the most connections, so I thought I would ask whether you rely on LinkedIn or
do you utilize another service more often? I know that I have relied on your
connections beforeWhat are your thoughts on this? May make an interesting
posting…
This certainly does make for an interesting posting. My initial thoughts on social platforms for my specific usage:
LinkedIn: I signed up in either late 2004 or early 2005 and was using this platform exclusively for business. I have over 500+ connections and tried to limit it to people who I either knew or did business with at some point in my career.
Facebook: I signed up a while back (not sure the exact date) and tried to limit it to just my close friends. I was successful in doing this, but had a few people I knew both personally and thru business that I originally didn’t let into my ‘network’ as I wanted to keep it exclusively for my close friends. This didn’t hold up.
Just as Ryan noticed above, I’ve seen a shift of LinkedIn users to the Facebook platform. Zuckerberg is very clear about Facebook: it’s a social utility that connects you with people around you. This doesn’t mean just college or highschool kids, this means everyone. My Facebook “friend” list has become dilluted over time to include business colleagues and folks that I’ve met briefly. I tried to stay away from this but it was just inevitable.
I’ve alluded to friend layers in the past. Social networks NEED this. Friends are not created equal. Also, not everyone is a friend. These social networks need friend layers; how these are deployed, I have no idea. The terminology? I don’t know. But we need to have restrictions and acknowledgement that not everyone is a ‘best friend’ and can access the same information.
As it stands today:
Person I meet in the street for 30 secs = My best friend in the entire world who I’ve known for 25 years
They both have access to the same information if they connect to me on Facebook or LinkedIn. Should this be? I’d argue.. no. This proves my hypothesis of Friend Layers. Who is building this into their social network platform?
So to sum this post all up, I’m going to say:
- Facebook has a branding/CI problem now
- LinkedIn/Facebook/other social nets need to create friend layers
Is LinkedIn losing business users? I have no clue. However, I’m seeing duplicate registrations and purposes across Facebook/LinkedIn of certain users (and growing). I’m sure we’ll see triplicates as the next hot social network/platform emerges…